Thursday, January 12, 2017

I write movie
columns my own way, no questions asked. Got it down real tight. I emerge from
the mist, plan the job, see the movie, write the piece, deliver it, return into
the mist. There’s a few out there like me, roaming the land. Those who need us
know where to find us.

Den of critics

I get tipped off
about a job in the East End. A guy – calls himself “Smith” – needs 20,000 words
on John Waters’ Pecker. It’s a three-man
job – a hundred bucks a head. We meet in an abandoned warehouse in Scarborough.
Smith lays out the plan. The burly guy with a French accent does the plot
summary. The tattooed kid from the Prairies handles the snippy comments about
the actors (I take one look at this kid and know he’ll let us down – he talks
the talk but hasn’t served his time. I throw out a line about Pink Flamingos and the schmuck comes
back with some crap about seagulls). I’m the “artistic overview” man. I sit
back, let Smith say his piece, draw his diagrams (it’s his money). “It won’t
work,” I tell him then. “We need a fourth man. An editor.”

“There’s no editor.
You three are the team.”

“What are the 20,000
words for?”

“You don’t need to
know.”

“Are they for kids,
for novices, for enthusiasts?”

“You’ll get that
information later.”

“If we’re not doing
the job right, my price goes up. A hundred now, a hundred on delivery.” He
stares, sees where I’m coming from, retreats into the shadows and places a
call, presumably to the real money men. The French guy offers me a cigarette,
which I accept. I feel pretty good about him. He looks and listens, but keeps
his mouth shut; he knows the rules, he’s one of us. Meanwhile the kid starts
bragging about his cousin who works for Eye
magazine. I just soak it up. I’ll take care of him later.

Smith returns,
agrees to my terms. The screening’s in two days, maybe three. Then we have a
day to carry out the job. It’s going to take killer planning. I check out the
equipment. The computer’s OK, although the “F” key sticks. Smith commits to a
new keyboard. The beverages suck. No one writes on Mountain Dew. The chair
hurts my ass. He promises it’ll be replaced.

The documentarians!

The next night.
We’ve set up a deal with a research gang from North York to buy a stash of John
Waters clippings. We pull up in the designated alley, wait for the flash of
their headlights. We emerge from our car, two guys emerge from theirs, we meet
in the middle. “We’ve got the money,” says Frenchie, and when they ask to see
it, he holds up the crisp twenty dollar bill (and that’s U.S.) in the
moonlight. “Where’s the stuff?”

They tell us it’s in
the trunk. Frenchie and the kid follow them to the car. Suspicious, I hang
back. I scan the night like the cat. I notice they’re parked right under a
streetlight. I see a rustling in the shadows; a glimmer off a lens. I instantly
figure it out. “They’re not researchers,” I yell. “They’re documentarians.
They’re putting us in their goddamn video.” My partners turn to steel, tackling
the others as I go for the secret shooter. I overpower him easily, smash his
camera. They’re no match for us. We get away with the Waters clippings and some
Star Trek videotapes we find in the
back seat, and we keep the twenty.

Well, more on that
some other time. Now, for a complete change of pace, to John Frankenheimer’s
new thriller Ronin.

French twists

Ronin is a grand,
somewhat old-fashioned concoction, in which an international band of
mercenaries come together in Paris to pull off the theft of an extremely
important and closely-guarded suitcase. The movie has a great pace, beautiful
French settings, some of the best car chases in memory, lots of neat little
plot touches and Robert De Niro – not
in one of his lazy cameos as the villain, but as the smartest and most
resourceful of the group.

And the movie’s kind
of cool. De Niro and Jean Reno (as the second smartest and most resourceful of
the group) always do it just right. They’re not demonstrative or ironic
quipsters in the contemporary style – maybe just a throwaway remark to break
things up – but they get things done. There’s an impressive imagination in the
details here. During a struggle, De Niro gains the upper hand by strategically
spilling a cup of hot coffee he’d left in a particular spot a few moments
earlier, apparently having foreseen exactly when and how he’d need it. Casing
out their adversaries in a hotel lobby, he effortlessly orchestrates a false
alarm to see how they react in an attack situation, while setting up a tourist
to take pictures of the whole thing. He has a slight weakness for a beautiful
woman, but…well, that’s allowed as long as you don’t go overboard. And he
doesn’t.

On balance, Ronin should displace Out of Sight as the consensus choice for
the year’s best thriller so far. The latter was a little too self-conscious in
its effects for my taste: I liked the individual pieces well enough, but it
didn’t take off for me. The actors seemed somewhat distanced from the material,
all doing their own charismatic pirouettes, all determined to get good reviews,
whereas Ronin looks as if everyone
turned up on the set, nodded taciturnly to each other (perhaps through a cloud
of cigarette smoke) and went to work. The style is beautifully fluid, dazzling
in its clarity and simplicity, right on the nail. The only way to do the job.

I mean, after the
young punk proved me right and double-crossed us, you don’t think we struck a
pose and cried into our soup do you? A man I know from the old days at the
agency got us a fix on the kid’s cell phone. We tracked him down to a room in
Guelph (those John Waters cultists try to avoid the bid cities). Frenchie and I
pulled up outside, and waited. And then, when he finally came out to buy Entertainment Weekly, we pounced!

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Two new comedies
with exactly opposite problems: one too unambitious and set in its ways, the
other with a reach that far exceeds its grasp. From that summary, the former
sounds like the best bet for the conservative viewer, until I tell you it’s
directed by the legendarily wicked John Waters. But, as we know, the once
shocking has a tendency to become endearing over time. Not that Waters’ work
wasn’t truly jaw-dropping at its peak. But if it makes you quiver nowadays, it
probably isn’t with outrage, but rather with disbelief that (a) Waters ever
thought up that stuff, and (b) that he then found anyone willing to enact it.
The chicken molestation scene in Pink
Flamingos is pretty high on my list of things I wouldn’t do for any amount
of money (and would be even higher if not for the dog poop-eating scene).

Ode to Baltimore

But Pink Flamingos, despite its central
theme of Divine enacting the “filthiest person alive” – a status I’m sure most
viewers happily conceded – had a weird affinity for family and domesticity,
even if enacted by grotesques and perverts. Over the years, Waters has become
softer in his approach to these subjects, while growing almost as famous for
his love of Baltimore as for the, uh, other stuff. His new movie Pecker synthesizes these strands in a
way that’s perhaps revealing about the earlier work. Young Pecker (ostensibly
so named for his habit of pecking at his food – well, isn’t that convenient), a sweet-natured youth
who constantly captures the world around him on his cheap camera, becomes an
instant sensation when a New York gallery owner happens upon an exhibition (on
the walls of a burger dive) of his artless but helplessly evocative
photographs. He’s whizzed off to New York, where the intelligentsia fawns over
him and he’s showered in adulation, money and commissions.

But the
often-chronicled dark side of fame quickly sets in, with adverse consequences
for Pecker’s entire family and social circle. Must Pecker sacrifice the pursuit
he loves to regain harmony? Well, you’ll have a pleasant enough hour and a half
finding out. Indeed, the most striking aspect of the movie is its sheer
amiability. Pecker’s life in Baltimore is a down-at-heel paradise, bursting
with goodwill toward the homeless, the crackpots, the kleptomaniacs and – with
particular relish perhaps – the gays (Martha Plimpton’s role as Pecker’s
sister, devoted to her role of professional fag hag, is perhaps the best of
many goofily precise performances in the film). The shock value in Pecker consistently seems based in a
delight at the foibles and eccentricities that keep people going under
economically and environmentally challenged conditions. Some characters – like
the dotty grandmother who puts a parrot-like stream of “Full of grace”s into
the mouth of her plastic Virgin Mary, then claims she’s witnessing a miracle –
are treated with as much kindness as they could hope for anywhere in Filmland
(in There’s Something About Mary for
instance, granny would have been stripped topless and the Virgin sold into
bondage).

Limp and Limper

That might have been
fine if Pecker never moved out of
Baltimore, but I found the film’s overall direction really quite off-putting.
The jabs at New York styles and pretensions have substantially less wit to
them, and although Waters’ inherent good nature staves off bitchiness, it’s
hard not to read the film as being simply anti-intellectual. The quirky
tolerance of Pecker’s environment is appealing from the outset – it’s not like It’s a Wonderful Life, where the
protagonist needs a series of
revelations to show him the true value of home. In that light, the picture’s
entire trajectory is redundant. As it went on, I wasn’t sure whether I was
witnessing a display of insecurity, or one of self-congratulation. In any
event, Pecker ends up seeming
progressively limp.

That’s nothing
though compared with the startling tailspin of Stanley Tucci’s current The Impostors. It’s a consciously
old-fashioned farce, with lots of running around and mistaken identity and
comic violence and lust and that kind of thing, built around two unemployed
actors (played by Tucci and Oliver Platt) who inadvertently become stowaways on
a cruise ship. The first twenty minutes or so, consisting of a series of
sketches around Platt and Tucci’s mishaps on dry land, are fairly wonderful –
visually stylish, imaginative, painstakingly written and acted, with a fresh
eye for classic slapstick and bumbling (and the cameo by Woody Allen doesn’t
hurt either).

Sinking feelings

But once the action
switches to the ship, with twelve or so key characters to juggle, the rot
quickly sets in. There’s not much wrong with the concept that I can see, but
the movie foolishly overburdens itself with plots (a kidnapping, a conspiracy
to blow up the ship, a suicidal entertainer, a deposed queen, to name about a
third of them). The slamming of doors (and the accompanying musical motif)
becomes increasingly tedious; the actors get squeezed; the jokes get
mechanical; things become purely (and barely) functional. The cast, pretty
strong on paper, is squandered: the likes of Steve Buscemi and Lili Taylor have
never seemed so dull, and how could Tucci make Next Stop Wonderland’s intriguing actress Hope Davis so washed-out
and, well, ugly? The film’s closing Blazing
Saddles-like conceit, in which the cast dances off the ship, through the
set, and out into the studio parking lot, is a blatant (and failed) attempt to
strike a camaraderie with the audience that the movie’s second half distinctly
fails to earn on its merits.

Given the success of
the earlier tighly-focused sequences (and of Tucci’s first film, Big Night, co-directed with Campbell
Scott), this looks primarily like a case of over-reaching – a flaw easily
correctable for the next film. As for The
Impostors, the highlights I’ve mentioned – as well as a few other bits here
and there (I particularly liked Billy Connolly as an untypical homosexual
predator) – make it no more than a passable time-killer.

So although in
principle it seems more commendable to aim too high than too low, Pecker scores a clear win as the better
film of these two, if only by default.
Unless Waters hits on something new, or steps into something really disgusting, Tucci should get the
better of him next time round.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).